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Revisiting Joyce's Künstlerroman (Joyce Studies in Italy, 2017)

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Revisiting Joyce's Künstlerroman (Joyce Studies in Italy, 2017) See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334520626 Revisiting Joyce’s Künstlerroman (Joyce Studies in Italy, 2017) Article · January 2017 CITATIONS READS 0 189 1 author: Jolanta Wawrzycka Radford University 58 PUBLICATIONS 25 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE All content following this page was uploaded by Jolanta Wawrzycka on 26 July 2019. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. JOLANTA WAWRZYCKA ‘TELL US, AREN’T YOU AN ARTIST?’ (SH 26) – REVISITING JOYCE’S KÜNSTLERROMAN.1 In the infirmary at Clongowes Wood College, Stephen recalls a nurse- ry rhyme and feels moved by its words: How sad and how beautiful! He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music” (P 22). Stephen’s initial visceral responses to aural, visual and linguistic stim- uli will eventually morph into a sharp intellectual discernment and confidence in his own uniqueness, though they will also be muffled by moments of wariness: [h]is thinking was a dusk of doubt and self-mistrust, lit up at mo- ments by the lightnings of intuition, but lightnings of so clear a splendour that in those moments the world perished about his feet as if it had been fire-consumed (P 177). 1 This essay is dedicated to Rosa Maria Bolletieri. It marks my celebration of the 100th anniversary of the publication of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 29th De- cember 1916, and is based on my presentation at the X James Joyce Italian Foundation Conference, University Roma Tre on 2nd February 2017. I thank organizers Franca Ruggi- eri and Enrico Terrinoni for allocating a separate session for my presentation; my Chair, Rosemary Guruswamy, for travel funds; and Kim Gainer (Radford University) and Steph- anie Nelson (Boston University) for astute comments that greatly improved this piece 233 In this essay, a continuation of my discussion of the very young Ste- phen as a budding artist (Wawrzycka 2011),2 I wish to focus on the older Stephen and to reflect on Joyce’s engagement with the elements of the Bildungsroman and the Künstlerroman, hoping, as I revisit Joycean literature on the subject, to bring into sharper relief the com- plexity of Joyce’s deployment of some of the elements of the genres, particularly of the Künstlerroman. The latter term has fallen from much critical discussion as most critics read A Portrait as a Bildungs- roman. But given that Joyce problematizes biographical and fictional writing by inflecting Stephen’s artistic development with his own, I want to propose that to read Joyce’s novel also as a Künstlerroman is to trace the nuances of the genre that appear to have been very much on Joyce’s mind. Tellingly, when Chester G. Anderson set out to pro- duce his iconic critical edition of A Portrait, he sought to “place the Portrait in the tradition of the Künstlerroman” (Anderson 1968: 3). One of his contributors, Harry Levin, does just that: for Levin, “[t]he Künstlerroman … is the only conception of the novel that is special- ized enough to include A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” (Lev- in 1960: 42; 1968: 400).3 For J. H. Buckley, the Künstlerroman is “a tale of the orientation of an artist” and, indeed, he sees most of the English Bildungsroman novels of “youth or apprenticeship” as “a kind of Künstlerroman” (Buckley 1974: 13).4 In such novels the hero 2 See also note 17. 3 Levin’s “The Artist” (1968) originally appeared in his book, James Joyce (1960). Anderson also includes Maurice Beebe’s “Artist as Hero” which is an “Introduction” to Beebe’s Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts (1964), though it is the last chapter of that book, “The Return from Exile,” that offers a more comprehensive reading of A Portrait in terms of Stephen’s artistic development. Beebe sees Joyce’s A Portrait as “a demonstration of Stephen’s fulfilment as artist” (50), but rather than Künstlerroman, he uses the term “Künstlerdrama form” because works in the artist-hero tradition such as Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken and Hauptmann’s Michael Kramer were especially influential for Joyce (Beebe 1964: 267). 4 Buckley contrasts the English Bildungsroman with the German Bildungsroman, defined by Susanne Howe Noble as the “novel of all-around development or self-culture” with “a more or less conscious attempt on the part of the hero to integrate his powers, to cultivate himself by his experience.” Howe Noble, 6; quoted in Buckley, 286 n.19. 234 emerges as an artist of sorts, a prose writer like David Copperfield or Ernest Pontifex, a poet like Stephen Dedalus, an artisan and as- piring intellectual like Hardy’s Jude, a painter like Lawrence’s Paul Morel or Maugham’s Philip Carey”. (Buckley 1974: 13) Joyce stands out in this group, states Buckley, because he “sums up, even as he transforms, the traditions of the nineteenth-century Bild- ungsroman” and, even though Joyce “had no great respect for Goe- the,5 he referred to him several times in an early version of the Por- trait,” evidently fascinated by Wilhelm Meister and a study of the artist at odds with a Philistine public and…by Wilhelm’s quest for self-culture, com- parable as it is to Stephen’s self-conscious dedication to his Daeda- lian destiny”. (Buckley 1974: 226) Interestingly, Castle, in his early discussion of A Portrait as a Bild- ungsroman, “subsumes” the term Künstlerroman “under the term Bildungsroman” (Castle 1989: 25). Following suit, Weldon Thornton, also deems the distinction between the Bildungsroman and Künstler- roman inconsequential, finding “no significant differences” between the two terms in his reading of A Portrait (Thornton 1994: 183n.11). By contrast, Margaret McBride, in her book Ulysses and the Meta- morphosis of Stephen Dedalus (2001), discusses Stephen as a protag- onist of the Künstlerroman and proffers examples of how Joyce revo- 5 The footnote here is Buckley’s; it directs readers to Epstein (1971), pp. 128-129, 200. Buckley adds: “Epstein cites three mentions of Goethe in Stephen Hero and one in the published Portrait. He argues that the battle of the puppets David and Goliath in Meis- ter suggested to Joyce the struggle of the artist against a hostile public. I suggest the theme of self-directed Bildung as the most striking parallel between Meister and the Por- trait” (Buckley 1974: n.2, 320-321). 235 lutionized the genre (McBride 2001: 12, 39).6 Castle revisits the Eng- lish Bildungsroman in his 2003 essay, “Coming of Age in the Age of Empire: Joyce’s Modernist Bildungsroman” and in his 2006 book, Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman. With the Künstlerroman still subsumed, Castle’s discussion of characters in select Modernist nov- els7 centres not so much on the characters’ artistic growth but on a broader idea of Bildung.8 Castle also illuminates critical polemics on the very nature of the Bildungsroman between the Germanists for whom the Bildungsroman “cannot exist outside the terrain marked out for it by German Enlightenment thinkers nearly two hundred years ago” (Castle 2003, 670), and critics who see the genre as thriving in early modern literary traditions outside Germany. He cites Franco Moretti’s contention that the Bildungsroman, in Castle’s words, enters a period of revival and transformation and becomes a pow- erful and relevant form for the negotiation of complex problems concerning identity, nationality, education, the role of the artist, and social as well as personal relationships. (Castle 2003, 670; my emphasis) 6 See especially McBride’s Chapter 2 for the Aristotelian underpinnings of the Kün- stlerroman (McBride 2001: 38-60). See also S. L. Goldberg (1963), esp. 72-75. 7 In addition to James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus and Gerty MacDowell, Castle’s book also discusses Thomas Hardy’s Jude Fawley, D. H. Lawrence’s Paul Morel, Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, and Virginia Woolf’s Rachel Vinrace. The term Künstlerroman ap- pears in Castle in reference to Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (2008: 271n75), and to Woolf’s The Voyage Out (2008: 290 n.201). 8 Bildung is understood as education through self-cultivation (Castle 2003: 665), an English equivalent to “coming of age” or “rites of passage” (Castle 2006: 7). Fritz Senn analyzes the term in great depth and points out that the noun “derives from verbs which in Old High German meant ‘to give shape and essence; or ‘to form or imitate a shape’; it could be applied to God the creator, reflexively it refers to natural forms.” Senn adds that “Oxen” fits that definition because the chapter is both “bilden and bilding (formation, cre- ation, development, education, the generation of forms). … If you were to recognize all the stylistic semblances that Joyce confects, you would be said to have Bildung (educa- tion, breeding, culture, often a wide-ranging knowledge in the humanistic tradition)” (Senn, 1995: 66-67). 236 Thus, A Portrait emerges as a modernist variant of the Bildungsro- man, a form that allowed Joyce to “translate disempowerment into narratives of survival, even if survival meant descent and, ultimately, exile” (Castle 2003, 670). In my argument, A Portrait emerges also as a modernist variant of the Künstlerroman. Joyce’s modernist re-dress of both genres in- cludes Stephen’s nonconformity and his denunciation of all authority, except for the rule of art. While the youthful “apprenticeship” of Ste- phen’s nineteenth century novelistic predecessors culminates in a largely seamless integration into adulthood, Joyce’s design offers no such “arrival” for Stephen. But Stephen’s pronounced “artistic” bent bolsters the novel’s status as Künstlerroman, well captured in Buck- ley’s phrase, “a tale of the orientation of an artist”, referenced above.
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